Education as leisure: freedom from the spectacle

“In societies dominated by modern means of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.”(1)

As a teacher, this is nowhere more clearly seen than in the lives of our young people. The alienation from directly lived experience has reached its culmination through the mediation of ‘life’ through the lens of screens. Like some Ballardian dystopia, society (young people especially) are separated from reality by becoming observers of ‘instagram reality’(2), peering at life through phone screens, iPad screens, TV screens, laptop screens and car windscreens. 

“The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at.”(3)

This pseudo-world can only be looked at says Debord, the implication is that it cannot be experienced; there is a culmination of separation from the real world and this pseudo-world which becomes the domain of delusion and false consciousness. Debord posits that the spectacle is not a collection of images, it is the social relation between people that is mediated by images. 

I would like to suggest that one factor for the ‘escalating crisis’(4) in young people’s mental health is this separation. With the advent of social media and its ubiquity in their lives, it is no wonder that the social relation between young people is mediated by images. This inevitably will, and has, led to alienation, surely a cause of stress, anxiety and poor mental health.

Schools must consider this as they gain more autonomy to design their own curricula. Careful thought must be given to alleviating the alienation that the spectacle brings. How can schools promote episodes of directly lived experiences for their young people? How can curriculum design facilitate a move from the pseudo-world of delusion and false consciousness towards mindsets and social relations mediated not by image but by real person to person contact and relation. 

One possible solution has been proposed by Rebecca Rozelle-Stone.(5) She argues that schools and universities must become humane institutions of learning. The word school comes from the Greek root scholē which meant ‘leisure’ or ‘learned conversation’ or ‘spare time’. Rozelle-Stone proposes 4 components of scholē that might guide us to create schools, colleges, universities that fling off the mediation of social relation by images and become humane, direct experiential places that allow us to become more fully human.

The first is a temporal and spatial dimension. Leisure means ‘spare time’ as well as a ‘place for learned discussion’. This place is not colonised by commodity or business. Rozelle-Stone points out that the ancient Greeks viewed business as a-scholia or ‘un-leisure.’ A new ‘humane’ school would embrace leisure as an antidote to wildly outsized expectations of productivity and progress.(6) The pressure of achievement, exams, constant testing coupled with the separation and alienation consequent to the spectacle can hardly be good for the well being of young people. By removing as much of this pressure as we can through creating space and time for learning, conversation, social relations mediated through personal interaction and dialogue we would do students a huge favour. 

The second component of scholē connects freedom and the liberal arts. The pursuit of the liberal arts, in part, promotes a condition of leisure, wherein students gain the freedom to exercise their minds. Curricula designed to perpetuate economic systems of consumption and growth through preparing young people solely for a life of employment do so at the detriment of the human mind and spirit. The liberal arts must be studied for their own sake and the benefits they bring, not to job prospects, but to the humanity and well being of students, culture and society.

The third component of scholē that Rozelle-Stone proposes is that of autotelic activity. This means that the activity’s goal is the full exercise itself, for its own sake and one that is inherently joyful and playful. Schools must design curricula that achieve conditions of autotelic activity; conditions that promote the joyful, the active, the beautiful and attempt to perfect our humanity. 

“This means that scholē is about happiness. When students approach school instrumentally, it is often because they are being treated instrumentally—numbers in a classroom needed to justify this expansion of X program, or workers-in-training to contribute to the local economy. We have become so accustomed to ‘making a case’ for the economic usefulness of liberal arts that we fail to see that we strip schooling of its potency as an adventure with an undetermined end, an artistic exploration demanding experimentation and play, a joyful journey of discovery…and in the process of failing to remember all this, we also prepare students to be self-exploiting animal laborans who will chase ever-elusive performance benchmarks into their unfreedom. This is a cruel pedagogy.”(7)

The final component of scholē is communal. According to A. Bartlett Giamatti, leisure, as an ideal, is a state of unforced harmony with others. It is, ideally, to live fully amidst activity when the activity has the characteristic of freetime. It seems to me that this ideal of scholē as communal leisure is the antithesis of the spectacle. Schools must become sites of communal activity, where the students are individual, not homogenous commodities churning out reductive exam grades and progress measures. Students should play as individual notes of an orchestral harmony that is joyful, beautiful and meaningful.

Unlike Debord, who seems pessimistic when he states that unity of life can no longer be recovered, I see hope in the conversations happening in education at the moment. One hopes that the light we see at the end of the tunnel is not that of an approaching train (8) but a new dawn of progressive education and curricula. School leaders must drive the agenda, wresting it from the grasp of OFSTED and the DFE. This agenda must have the well-being of young people at its heart with a design that moves from the pedagogy of the oppressed (9) and the false consciousness of the image mediated spectacle and towards hope, freedom and directly lived experience.